Hoshigaki Season!

...of red and yellow leaves that comes elsewhere. In our house we believe in making hoshigaki in the fall with persimmons from either the market or, better yet, a neighbor or friend rather than chugging those pumpkin spice lattes. We’ve got a row of seven store bought persimmons hanging in a south facing window and plans to start more. Here’s what they look like when completed. If you’ve never tried making hoshigaki, a kind of transcendent dried fru...

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How to Make Amazake

...process by boiling the mixture, otherwise you’re heading down the road to making sake, something we plan on attempting in the fall. Taking a tip from the guru of fermentation Sandor Ellix Katz, we first boiled two cups of water and added the amazake to it to prevent burning. Mix well and as soon as the amazake begins to boil remove from the heat and refrigerate. You can eat it as a porridge or cut it with some more water to enjoy as a beverage. Y...

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Whole Wheat Sourdough Starter Recipe

UPDATE : we have a whole (so to speak) new take on making a starter. See our sourdough starter video for a better way to do this. Back in March we showed how to make a sourdough starter with white flour. This month we converted a white starter over to whole wheat and have baked many successful loaves of bread with it. The reason that we have to do this conversion rather than starting out with whole wheat flour is that whole wheat tends to get mol...

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Prickly Pear Jelly Recipe

...of cactus fruit to deal with this season. Next year we’ll take a crack at making a batch of Tiswin, the sacred beer of the Papagos Indians of central Mexico (usually made with saguaro fruit but prickly pear fruit will do in a pinch). This August we’re making jelly. Here’s how to do it: 1. Taking reader Steven’s (of the fine blog Dirt Sun Rain) suggestion, burn off the nasty spines by holding the fruit over a burner on the stove for a few seconds....

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Meet our book & web designer: Roman Jaster

Roman Jaster is the gifted designer who designed both Making It and this very website for us. He recently gave a Visiting Designer talk about his work at his alma mater, CalArts and made that lecture public on YouTube. In it, he talks about his childhood in East Germany, the decisions he made early-on which determined his career, his working methods (which are really interesting, combining coding with design) and talks about the concepts behind s...

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